School Notes: School of Medicine
May/June 2008

Cartoonist honored for mental illness advocacy

Garry Trudeau ’70, ’73MFA, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoon Doonesbury, received this year's Mental Health Research Advocacy Award from the Yale Department of Psychiatry. The honor is presented to someone who, through advocacy, has made an important contribution in advancing research designed to improve the lives of people with mental illness. Trudeau received the award for his portrayal of the readjustment issues faced by soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his cartoon strip and subsequent book, The Long Road Home, Trudeau chronicled his character BD's slow physical and emotional recovery from the loss of his leg in the Iraq war. (For a Yale Alumni Magazine report, see Light & Verity.)

A Yale test is highly accurate in detecting the "silent killer"

School of Medicine researchers have developed a blood test that can detect early-stage ovarian cancer with 99 percent accuracy. (See the alumni magazine report, March/April 2008, page 33.) The results expand on work done by the same Yale group in 2005 showing 95 percent effectiveness of a blood test. Adding two more biomarkers to the four used in the first trial, the latest clinical trial, led by Gil Mor, associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, tested 500 patients -- 350 healthy controls and 150 ovarian cancer patients. The results were published in the February 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research. Epithelial ovarian cancer is the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths in the United States and is three times more lethal than breast cancer. It is called the silent killer because usually it isn't diagnosed until its advanced stages. A third evaluation, testing close to 2,000 patients, has begun. Meanwhile, Yale has licensed the test to three companies.

Yale lab engineers a virus that can kill deadly brain tumors

A laboratory-engineered virus that can find its way through the vascular system and kill deadly brain tumors has been developed by Yale School of Medicine researchers. Anthony van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery, and his team transplanted tumor tissue from human or mouse brains into the brains of mice. Then they inoculated the mice with a lab-created vesicular stomatitis virus. Three days later, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead. Normal mouse brain cells and normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. "This underlines the virus's potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers," van den Pol said. About 200,000 people a year in the United States are diagnosed with brain tumors.

Simple steps reduce errors in obstetrical care

New patient-safety measures developed by researchers at the School of Medicine and implemented at Yale-New Haven Hospital are paying off. The interventions -- designed to reduce errors and improve the staff's impression of the safety climate -- include communication training, standardizing the interpretation of fetal monitoring, and the creation of the new staff position of patient-safety nurse.

Two and a half years after the new measures went into effect, the rate of adverse events such as medical errors and patient injury had decreased by about 60 percent, and positive perceptions of the hospital's safety climate had increased by 30 percent among staff members. Edmund F. Funai, associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, said the main cause of adverse events is a breakdown in communication, usually involving failure to recognize the severity of a situation or condition that affects a newborn's status.